Blog entry by Rcgp Learning

Your day to day frontline experience as a GP faces the recurrent themes of being task driven and time starved. The King’s Fund reports that the total number of face-to-face appointments with GPs has increased by 13.2 per cent over the past five years (1). There’s those urgent queries not booked in for appointments, the increased demand for face-to-face appointments, over-running clinics, managing expectations of the public, urgent phone calls to discuss medication, urgent prescriptions that need signing, the lab results to check and action, supervision, home visits, practice meetings… and then there needs to be time for revision and revalidation.

The RCGP wants to support you in achieving your revision and revalidation goals, so we recently launched GP SelfTest as the new RCGP accredited learning needs assessment tool for GPs at all career stages. This has been well received by Associates in Training (AiTs), RCGP members and peers in the wider GP profession. GP SelfTest aligns itself to the RCGP Curriculum, which outlines the skills and expertise you require to be able to practice as a GP in the United Kingdom. It allows you to choose from a selection of different tests that are tablet and mobile friendly so that you can test your knowledge in practice, at home or on the go, pausing tests and finishing sessions at times convenient for you.

The next Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) assessment is coming up on 25 October 2017. For AiTs, you can use GP SelfTest to get a head start with your AKT revision and practice with tests such as the AKT Mock Exams in timed and untimed conditions. By focusing on the AKT Mock Exams, you can take these tests an unlimited amount of times in individual sessions of 200 questions which can be paused and re-visited at any time; there are no demands on you to answer all questions in one sitting. After you have submitted a test, GP SelfTest will track and analyse your test results, providing a full breakdown of your performance across the RCGP curriculum to identify and target the areas that require improvement and will show you a benchmark comparison against your peers’ average scores.

For qualified GPs, you can utilise GP SelfTest throughout the year for your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to support you in meeting the requirements for appraisal and revalidation. Tests such as the Curriculum Wide Learning Needs Assessment (100 questions per session) and Topic-Specific tests (20 questions per topic in a session) will help you explore your knowledge and explore your current learning needs. You’ll benefit from easy access to comprehensive feedback to questions and links to even more digestible, user-friendly and up-to-date resources for further study. On GP SelfTest, you can use the reflection notes section to capture your thoughts on what you have learned and ask yourself questions such as:

What could I do differently? What are my key take-away messages? What difference will this make to my practice? How will I know/measure if this learning has successfully had an impact?

These reflection notes can be printed as a certificate, with a certificate of your test results, and used as evidence of your CPD in your ePortfolio.

In our users’ words, GP SelfTest has been described as: “an official question bank” with “good structure and content of questions” and “easy to use, attractive layout” that is a “better price than most”.

We want to help make things work better and ensure GP SelfTest is responsive to your needs. We’ve been listening to our users, monitoring feedback and using this to inform future developments. Recently, based on user feedback, GP SelfTest was upgraded with added features to aid your learning, such as:

We welcome all feedback and for those users who have completed the GP SelfTest feedback form, we thank you for taking the time to do so. It is thanks to you and the feedback you provide that GP SelfTest continues to develop to meet your day-to-day

Coming upWe will be adding a further 1,000 questions to the GP SelfTest question bank which are being rigorously quality assured to save you time and ensure you are provided with the most recent and relevant clinical knowledge and RCGP’s mark of excellence.

Free two week trial of GP SelfTestRCGP members are eligible for a free two week trial of GP SelfTest. Further information can be found here.